How the Right and Left Are Revising “Tough on Crime”

America has 5 percent of the world’s population but one-fourth of its prisoners. Nearly one-third of Americans are under correctional facilities’ control at a yearly cost of $60 billion. Imprisonment has grown 400 percent over the past twenty years, the great majority for non-violent crimes. And two-thirds of criminals are back in jail for similar crimes three years after they are released. Our current correctional policy is a national shame and it simply does not work.

Both Edwin Meese and Eric Holder, the attorneys general for presidents as different as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, have criticized this status quo. So have uber-liberal E.J. Dionne Jr. and New Right founder Richard Viguerie. The American Civil Liberties Union and Right on Crime agree. Holder’s plea to limit sentencing for non-violent offenders can be questioned coming from one who is otherwise criminalizing new civil procedures and is blunt that his motivation comes primarily from the “shameful” fact that black male perpetrators receive longer sentences than whites. Likewise, while calling for bipartisan agreement, Dionne also emphasized the need for gun control and ending “stop and frisk” laws, a sure means to derail agreement. Caution is called for but the fact that both left and right have expressed doubts is significant.

Even Dionne concedes the crisis began in the 1960s when an “anything goes” leftist counterculture romanticized illegal behavior as glorious acts of self-fulfillment and independence, all beamed to the public by a sympathetic media and popular culture. A liberal Supreme Court responded with decisions expanding criminal rights, limiting confinement and the death penalty, and restricting police response. Crime exploded with murder and willful manslaughter doubling from 5.1 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 10.2 by 1980. The people responded by demanding a narrowing of rights and tougher penalties. The politicians complied.

The right became identified with “tough on crime” even though the leading voice of this frustration was President Richard Nixon who was anything but conservative in most of what he did, overseeing large increases in welfare spending, environmental regulation, racial preferences, and even wage and price controls. More principled conservatives supported Nixon’s program out of outrage that the Supreme Court had acted so arbitrarily by overriding Congress, the Executive, and the states without the least consideration of public opinion. As the right gained politically for supporting tougher policing and punishment, the more pragmatic left led by then Senator Joe Biden claimed equal toughness on crime by applying the death penalty and longer sentencing to many less violent matters. Tough-on-crime turned bipartisan.

Conservatives began having second thoughts as laws exploded to criminalize vast new areas of social life. Today there are 4,000 federal laws elaborated by 300,000 national regulations with thousands more at the state and local levels. Even lawyers do not know the law outside their own narrow field. Most of the additions were for nonviolent offenses, now representing 90 percent of federal prisoners. Violent crimes such as murder, assault, robbery, rape, and battery are widely acknowledged as the most serious, with the guilty being rightly placed where they cannot hurt society again. But imprisonment for non-violent crime is another matter—especially considering that a 2009 Associated Press study found that 60,000 inmates were sexually assaulted that year.

Modern progressive crime and punishment relies upon a bureaucratized and professional police force—even militarized as SWAT teams become routine—aggressive prosecutors, and prisons that are supposed to reform during long sentences. In fact, most police and judicial action today is not preventative but reactive, and incarceration-oriented rather than rehabilitative. America’s conservative tradition was different. The Declaration of Independence was to a great degree a rejection of professional military policing. The Constitution highlighted local militia clauses, time restrictions on military appropriations, protections of habeas corpus, and limits on national power. Even an expert local police force in the U.S. is only a bit more than 100 years old. Traditional American order was kept by a locally selected constable responsible to his community whose purpose was to deter rather than apprehend, relying primarily on communal watchfulness and amelioration rather than force or imprisonment. This constable was backed only by a neighborhood watch reinforced, if necessary, by a posse comitatus and militia of all adult citizens, supervised by a circuit-riding state judge.

After a century of increasing bureaucratization, there is now a modern reaction. Today nearly 30 percent of the Americans live in private community associations that have assumed some security functions: neighborhood policing has been revived; gated communities and neighborhood watches have grown exponentially; and wanted posters have moved to neighborhood news circulars and even private shopping bags. Debate has been revived on the punishment side, too, with proposals for restitution repaid to victims, more effective probation, fines, house arrests with electronic monitoring, weekend jail time, halfway houses, public shaming such as on neighborhood billboards, and other such punishments short of prison that many now consider more effective in reducing non-violent crime.

The shift in conservative opinion is demonstrated by the large (including your author) list of activists and leaders signing the Right on Crime statement of principles supporting alternatives to incarceration. Republican governors like Georgia’s Nathan Deal, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett are leading such reform at the state level. The present system is too centralized, too bureaucratic, too nitpicking, too large, too based on artificial judicial rules, too adversarial, too bent on locking people up and, generally, too unimaginative. Conservative ideas about decentralization, experimentation, and limiting the scope of criminalized behavior can help to make our legal system more humane and more efficient in promoting order.

It would be a shame not to take advantage of the present moment when leaders left and right seem to agree the pendulum has swung much too far toward “toughness.” Even in today’s stalemated political environment, if liberals can retreat from their excesses and conservatives can come back to their historic position on crime, it just might be possible to redress the balance.

23 Responses to How the Right and Left Are Revising “Tough on Crime”

Speaking as a taxpayer, the idea of throwing into prison for years, non-violent drug offenders is stupid and wasteful. I am not advocation the legalization of all drugs, just a return to sanity, like we had prior to the current “war on drugs.” If someone is caught with a small amount of pot, fine them. $100 for first offense, $500 for 2nd offense, etc.

There are many people in prison who were caught with small amounts of pot and who are no threat to anyone. This is cruel to those people and an insane waste of money for the taxpayers.

Consider the huge pressures to “lock ’em up and throw away the key!”: prison guards unions, police and sheriff’s unions, prosecutors and their staffs, correctional system employees, prison construction and management corporations, the companies which provide food and clothing to prisoners, all have an interest in keeping the $60 billion dollar a year prison industry thriving. And you can’t do that without putting Americans away for a long time. In some states prisons are the only growth industry. Follow the money.

As a conservative crime victims’ advocate, I find Right on Crime to be dishonest about their goals and utterly dishonest in their conflation of federal rules with — increasingly unprosecuted — so-called “nonviolent” crimes such as burglary.

In tending to an agenda that is more about gaining media attention and cutting taxes than ethically analyzing the efficacy of real criminal justice, RoC grandstands without informing the public and cozies up with utter dirtbags like Al Sharpton.

You’re lending comfort to pro-offender activists and lending your voices to policies that, contrary to your claims, cost more in ridiculous and unproven rehabilitation schemes than early, firm intervention would. Along the way, you’re misrepresenting the reality of crime, misapprehending the problems plaguing the criminal justice system, and adding to the burden of citizens who must protect themselves from the repeat offenders your advocacy has helped keep free.

“Even Dionne concedes the crisis began in the 1960s when an “anything goes” leftist counterculture romanticized illegal behavior as glorious acts of self-fulfillment and independence, all beamed to the public by a sympathetic media and popular culture.”

Um, no. Once slum and blight developed as a result systemic disinvestment, creating fertile ground for black and other urban militant movements, governments responded by allowing a flood of cheap drugs into the ghettos, and more deterioration through “benign neglect.” Once this drug epidemic started impact white communities, the response was more law-and-order, more incarceration, mandatory minimums etc., thus the explosion of the prison population.

The permissive sixties attitudes may have loosened the morals of the upper classes but they were not the main drivers of the increase in incarceration.

1)Madoff was a non-violent offender–do people like him belong in prison?

2)The idea that millions of first time, non-violent drug offenders are languishing in prison is MYTH. It’s nearly impossible to be sent to prison for possession of small quantities of drugs UNLESS it is a parole violation, a tack-on charge to other, more serious offenses, or intent to distribute. Just doesn’t happen–if you don’t know this, make friends with some defense attorneys and prosecutors–they’ll tell you.

3)If you think for a second that the Lefties pushing this anti-prisons agenda will stop with NON-Violent offenses, you’re f***ing nuts. The Sentencing Project and all the rest of that scummy crowd doesn’t like incarceration PERIOD because they can’t grapple with the FACT that black and brown people commit the vast majority of crime in the U.S. They lie to themselves and everyone else and content that the ONLY reasons minorities have a higher incarceration rate is because of the Drug War and racism. They simply can’t deal with the demographic reality of race and crime. Why are conservatives aiding them in their lies and self deceptions?

Does this mean that Americans might actually give up teh stoopid on crime? That would be remarkable to see. I’m not confident of this outcome though, but then again, prison officials from Texas have come to my country to encourage my Conservative government NOT to follow in their footsteps.

Given that this delegation came from Texas (that soft on crime state), well, that says something. So far, we here haven’t gone too far down the idiot path as Americans did, but things are definitely getting more stringent. They haven’t build the 20 billion dollars worth of new prisons yet, but it’s still in the works. Who they plan to fill them with, remains to be seen.

Republicans may not want to give up the means to disenfranchise “Obama voters” (just to play the race angle which is definitely a part of this). How else with the Republicans disenfranchise voters who won’t vote form in the foreseeable future? Voter ID laws only go so far after all. Republicans might want to be careful of getting rid of this handy dandy tool in the toolbox in getting rid of hostile (i.e. Black) voters.

Mark down another vote here for Tina Trent’s and jon smythe’s sensibilities in general.

With the footnote that I think we still have an undeniably terrible incarceration issue that’s overwhelmingly caused by the ridiculous war on what what people want to put into their bodies in the privacy of their own homes.

Get rid of that and those in jail due to same and maybe even more ought to be spending time behind bars.

Correcting this travesty will be helped by ending the “blame the permissive 60’s game.” Your article disingenuoulsy notes that murder and manslaughter doubled between 1960 and 1980, while ignoring the fact that violent crime continued to rise at the same or greater rate until its peak under Reagan/Bush, in 1991. Criminologist have identified a wide range of causes for the rise, including the baby boom and lead paint. Likewise the lowering in crime that took place from 1994-2011 is attributed to many factors beyond long prison sentenced and more police enforcement, mostly notably the large number of abortions. Nothing will be accomplished, and much good will be squandered, by resurrecting debunked myths and promulgating half truths.

Ending the practice of private for-profit Prisons would be the first step, but as long as the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America are making billions off the taxpayers for keeping prisoners locked up longer this will NEVER happen.

What is this article saying? OK, so everyone agrees that too many people are incarcerated. That is conventional wisdom at this point. The author jumps from unfounded speculation (the 60’s the cause of urban drug crime?) to unexplored ideas about ‘stop and frisk’. The urban black community is caught between a rock and a hard place. Mothers and fathers don’t want their sons jacked up by an overzealous cop, but also don’t want to live in crime infested neighborhoods. How do you reconcile this? This article gives no insight.

Coming up on 5 years ago, one Lily Burk was murdered by a ‘non-violent’ offender. Oh sure, he was about a ten time loser, but just for ‘non-violent’ offenses — burglary and the like.

But, as Susan Estrich pointed out in her column on the killing — which shook the literati of LA, as it was the murder of one of their own — the truth is that a lot of Charles Samuels ’non-violent’ convictions were almost certainly plead down from violent, more serious offenses.

Or, more currently, the guys who stole the wallet and wedding ring of a dying woman in Witchita recently all — all had records and were out on parole.

There’s a reason why the only unqualified success of the last 20 years of social policy has been a dramatic reduction in crime…we now jail criminals until they ‘age out’ of wanting to commit a lot of crime.

For me as usual — the first problem in deciphering and responding to this issue is to define liberal and conservative.

The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution and as such adherence to it’s purposes, ” in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

In that tradition keeping in the bounds of objective standards — a push for compliance to it tenets is wholly conservative.

You have to go further back than the 60s to track the original flood of drugs into black neighborhoods. This goes back to the 50s when the phenomenon was known, aided and abetted by corrupt government officials and law enforcement as a form of social control and as a source of additional funding.

Prediction: nothing will be done. The status quo is just fine for those who benefit from it, the most powerful and rich among us. We seem to have arrived at a crisis where our putative democracy-cum-oligarchy no longer functions well for the majority of the nation other than the elites.

I no longer work in the criminal justice system precisely because the best solutions to crime and criminality were ignored for the ones that were politically expedient. Tough on crime, blah blah blah. Most people I worked with simply needed to get sober and learn some skills, not much more to it.

And we need to take a weed-wacker to the criminal codes, starting with the drug laws.